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UCL research team breakthrough in delivering drugs to the brain

8 March 2013

Researchers
at UCL have made a breakthrough in the way that drugs could be delivered to the
brain.

Ijeoma F. Uchegbu, Mariarosa
Mazza, Andreas G. Schätzlein and their colleagues have tackled
the difficult problem of constructing drugs which are able to pass through the
blood-brain barrier – a mechanism which prevents many chemicals in the
bloodstream from passing into the brain, including synthetic compounds administered
as medication as well as harmful environmental toxins.

A new class of drugs – peptide drugs – are now at the
forefront of tackling this problem, which, if solved, could revolutionise
delivery of pain relief as well as offer hope in treating neurodegenerative
diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Enabling such drugs to
cross the blood-brain barrier is key to revolutionising the treatment of these
conditions.

Professor Uchegbu and her team’s breakthrough has been to
modify a pain-relief drug – Dalargin – to successfully cross this barrier
through attaching a group of lipids, or fat molecules, to enable its passage
into the brain in mice in the form of a molecule known as a nanofibre.

To see if the nanofibers helped the drug reach the brain,
the team at UCL injected two groups of mice with the drug: one were given the
unmodified version, while the other were administered the drug in the form of a
nanofibre. After scanning, it was found that the modified drug has successfully
passed into the brains of the mice that had ingested it.

“This is really just the tip of the iceberg in the potential
of this type of structure in terms of how we can deliver drugs to the brain,”
says Professor Uchegbu. “It could be expanded to a whole range of other peptide
drugs, and we are looking in the future to focus on whether we can transfer the
success of this research to other classes of drugs, such as enkephalins.